27. Alani
TWENTY-SEVEN
ALANI
His name was Derek Solis. Twenty-six years old.
Communications degree from a mid-tier university in Connecticut.
Clean background check—no criminal record, no financial red flags, no social media posts that screamed corporate saboteur.
He had been hired through Convention Talent Solutions three months ago, placed in the vendor-liaison office, and assigned to manage supply chain communications for the convention’s secondary vendors.
Alani stared at the timeline. Three days of joint investigation had produced a picture so clean it was almost insulting.
Derek Solis had used the shared terminal in the vendor-liaison office because his personal credentials were firewalled from the master schedule.
He had accessed the registration database through a colleague’s login—a colleague who left her station unlocked during lunch, a habit he had clearly noted and exploited.
The NovaCraft connection was the cleverest piece: he had routed the competing offer through two intermediary companies before it landed on NovaCraft’s desk, but Giselle had traced the financial chain back to its origin in under forty-eight hours because Giselle treated corporate paper trails the way bloodhounds treated scent.
“So we fire him,” Rowan said. He leaned against the office wall with his arms crossed, his posture projecting the particular brand of relaxed menace that dragons apparently developed after six hundred years. “Terminate, escort out, legal action, press charges if applicable.”
“No.”
Both dragons looked at her.
Alani pulled up a chair. She had arrived at the Javits Center at 6:30 that morning—earlier than Chaos, which she considered a personal victory—and she had spent ninety minutes staring at Giselle’s financial trace before the answer crystallized.
The right answer. The one that turned a defensive position into an offensive strike.
“We don’t fire him,” she said. “We use him.”
Chaos tilted his head. The three-degree angle. Interest.
“Derek Solis is a pipeline,” Alani continued.
“Right now, information flows one direction: out of our systems and into whoever is running this operation. If we fire him, the pipeline closes. They know we found them. They regroup, adjust, come at us from a different angle—and next time, we might not catch it before the convention opens.” She tapped the timeline on the tablet.
“But if we keep him in place and start feeding him bad data—modified schedules, fake vendor contracts, false programming details—the pipeline reverses. Every piece of disinformation he passes along tells us where it ends up and who receives it. We turn their spy into our tracker.”
Rowan uncrossed his arms. The relaxed menace shifted into focused attention.
“The false data needs to be specific enough to be credible but distinct enough to trace,” Alani said.
“Different versions for different documents. A fake celebrity guest on the Tuesday schedule. A phony vendor contract with a made-up company name. A programming change that moves the cosplay competition to a hall that doesn’t exist. Each piece unique.
Each piece tagged so that when it surfaces—wherever it surfaces—we know exactly which document Solis accessed and who he gave it to. ”
She looked at Chaos. He had not spoken. His eyes had gone pale—the deep silver that meant he was running calculations behind a face designed to reveal nothing.
His hands rested on the desk, still, fingers laced.
No warmth rolling off him. No temperature shift.
The dragon was not reacting to threat. The dragon was hunting.
“This traces back to Griffin Media,” he said. Not a question.
“This traces back to wherever the information goes. If that’s Griffin Media, we’ll have the evidence chain to prove it. Every leaked document, every recipient, every handoff point—all documented, all timestamped, all admissible.”
Chaos studied her. The silver eyes moved across her face with the systematic attention he applied to threat assessment—except the threat here was not Alani.
The threat was how thoroughly she continued to exceed the boundaries of every mental model he had built for her.
She could see it: the recalculation happening in real time, the categories he’d assigned her expanding to accommodate a woman who could replace a vendor in forty-eight hours AND design a counterintelligence operation over morning coffee.
“You think like a dragon,” he said.
The words landed in the quiet office. Rowan’s eyebrows rose—a subtle lift that carried, for a six-hundred-fifty-year-old dragon, the equivalent of a standing ovation.
Alani leaned back in her chair. Crossed her arms. The posture mirrored his, and she watched him notice it, and the noticing produced the faintest break in his composure—a twitch at the left edge of his mouth that she was still withholding the privilege of calling a smile.
“I think like a convention director who has handled entitled vendors, stolen merchandise, and a celebrity who brought a live snake to a panel,” she said. “A corporate spy is Tuesday.”
Rowan made a sound—not a laugh, closer to a bark that he converted to a cough three-quarters of the way through.
His hand covered his mouth. His eyes, when they met Alani’s, held four hundred years of friendship with Chaos and the specific delight of a man who had been waiting a very long time for someone to match his alpha point for point.
“The live snake,” Chaos said. His voice was perfectly level. “At a panel.”
“Phoenix, 2022. A-list voice actor brought his emotional support boa constrictor to a villain voice panel and it escaped during the Q&A. I caught it behind the merchandise booth while the security team was still figuring out how to file the incident report.” Alani picked up her coffee.
“The boa was a sweetheart, actually. Much easier to manage than a corporate espionage ring. Snakes don’t have parent companies. ”
“I need details on the snake incident,” Rowan said. “Later. When there’s time. I want all of them.”
“Focus,” Chaos said, but the temperature in the office rose a degree, and Alani filed the temperature spike under the private heading she’d created during the archive visit: “Things the Dragon King does when he is trying very hard not to let me know I’m winning.”